Womanhood
Matt Walsh’s film, What Is a Woman?, is clocking up millions of views on the internet. The question raised in it is real. It generates perplexity in our day, sometimes in unexpected fora. A year or so ago, Professor Hanna Barbara Gerl Falkowitz spoke (at 37.45) of a recent vote in the assembly of Germany’s Synodaler Weg. A call had been made for this vote to be taken by women only, something the assembly’s constitutions allowed. So far, so good. Yet when the procedure was about to begin, someone asked, ‘What, then, is a woman?’ No one could come up with an acceptable answer. A solution was found. Those members were allowed to vote who were ‘not men’. Gerl Falkowitz calls this option ‘incredibly interesting’, adding: ‘Here we are back before Simone de Beauvoir, before feminism’, with womanhood described in terms of negation, no positive definition being speakable. Intellectually, this is a deadlock. Intellectual deadlocks tend to be short-lived. Minds, men’s and women’s, do have an innate appetite for sense and an impatience with nonsense.